‘Through a glass darkly’: Dyslexic Identity and Hermeneutic injustice.

This article is written by four dyslexic disability scholars who reject dyslexia as an explanatory account. Instead, we adopt Lexism – the Othering of dyslexics by normative practices and assumptions of literacy (Collinson, 2012, 2022, 2023). We are asserting a political positioning, and our own self-identity in what is a thought piece, rather than a standard academic approach. To do so we explore our own ambivalent experiences of diagnosis. The new concept of Lexism is a means to challenge the ‘power intellectual’ (Said, 1978) wielded by those who define and categorise dyslexics. We treat the ‘diagnosis’ of dyslexia as an expression of both Lexism (normative literacy) and power intellectual. The purpose is to highlight the often-inadequate diagnosis process, through the lens of ‘hermeneutic injustice’ (Fricker, 2007). That is the nomenclature surrounding dyslexia and other related psychological diagnoses leaves dyslexics disempowered and hampered in recognising instances of injustice. As dyslexic disability scholars we struggled to understand our dyslexic identity, impaired by hermeneutic injustice we made sense of our experiences of Lexism with difficulty. The injustice was there but invisible to us – how we came to perceive more clearly is the focus of this article.